1. Field of the Invention
Exemplary embodiments of the present invention relate to a method and apparatus for encoding and decoding an image, and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for encoding and decoding a plurality of image frames of an image sequence.
2. Description of the Related Art
Image compressing methods, such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4H.264/MPEG-4 advanced video coding (AVC), perform prediction encoding with respect to an image frame by using inter prediction or intra prediction.
A plurality of image frames of an image sequence are divided into Intra (I) pictures, predictive (P) pictures, or bi-directional predictive (B) pictures, and prediction encoding is performed with respect to the divided image frames, and an image sequence bitstream is generated.
I pictures are encoded using intra prediction in order to remove a spatial redundancy of a frame irrespective of frames before and after the frame. P and B pictures are encoded using inter prediction in order to remove a temporal redundancy between frames. P pictures are encoded using forward inter prediction. B pictures are encoded using bi-directional prediction.
A pixel value of each image frame is not encoded but a residual value generated by removing a spatial or temporal redundancy is encoded, thereby encoding an image at high compressibility.